Learning To Limp
Written in 2012 after a period of three days of having Jesse Jackson's poem "I Am Somebody" on repeat in my head. This piece came out of my head fully-formed soon after, I barely changed a word.
Well, it’s December and ’tis the season to be filled with holiday hoo-ha. I have a history of hating this time of year for any number of reasons ...the rampant commercialism, the religious insensitivity, the return of Mariah Carey assaulting my ears in every public space. The notion that THIS is the definitive time of year to get together and drink and eat and shower each other with gifts and love one another. People getting sentimental over concepts they will eventually shitcan when the twinkling lights go back in the box.
There, I said it.
Around this time of year in 2002, I was in rural Maine with my former boyfriend’s family. We weren’t there to celebrate a traditional snowy holiday together; we had all come to see my boyfriend’s sister Karen, who was in the hospital. Karen was a religious woman who’d lead a quiet life. She had joined the Army so she could go to college, she had married, had a son, she had divorced. She had a decent job working at a printing press before she fell ill. The local paper mill had polluted the water that everyone drank from their well and as they employed most of the town, investigations and clean up were not on the agenda. Karen had survived bone marrow cancer almost a decade before and breast cancer a few years later.
For a handful of years we lived with a sense of precarious optimism about her health until she had a routine procedure to investigate why she was having trouble breathing. The doctors found her lungs invasively peppered with tiny tumors; she never left the hospital. After weeks of being dependent on medications to keep her heart beating and machines to keep her lungs pumping, the family decided with heavy hearts to let her go.
The last morning they were to see her, I stayed home with Karen’s fourteen-year-old son, Jason. We ate lunch and watched Ocean’s Eleven, not really sure what to say to one another. About the time that Danny Ocean and his crew were finishing up their caper, the family returned. They were reticent, appearing understandably traumatized, but being good New Englanders, they stoically proceeded to make dinner and get back to life’s routines as we all knew them.
We proceeded to make funeral arrangements. We shopped for caskets. When Karen’s mother asked what I thought of the pink casket that stood out from the others, I told her I thought it was lovely. She asked me if I could help pick out clothes for Karen to be buried in as she didn’t think anyone else would be up to sorting through her stuff yet. I told her it was not a problem, of course I would. Karen’s bedroom was decorated with bible passages and on her desk was a list of charitable organizations she vowed to help when she was well enough. The world felt out of balance as I considered that most of my free time and disposable income went towards the spoils of self indulgence. Her mother asked me if she would want to be buried in a dress. We both agreed, no, it wasn’t who she was. We opted for simple pants and a sweater. Thanks, she said to me, you’ve been a rock through all of this.
At the service, we sang Christmas carols and talked about how she was in a better place and we ate those little finger sandwiches that I’ve only seen at family gatherings in small towns. We heard the firing of rifles and the honor guard came in with a neatly folded flag and the shell casings to present to Jason, now the son of a deceased veteran. Something about that particular visual destroyed my resolve. There, in a tiny church, in a tiny town, I had a colossal meltdown. I completely lost it, sobbing inconsolably in front of God and well, everyone. Karen’s sister-in-law put her arms around me and said, “Well, look who’s not made of stone.”
The Christmases that followed over the next few years were quieter, for the most part. We ate racks of lamb and drank Pinot Noir and made pumpkin pies. One holiday I opted to travel for work and I got drunk at a punk rock bar in Las Vegas, which was a decadent diversion. Life pressed on. I broke up with Karen’s brother quite a few years back and moved to Chicago. It just felt like the right place for a broken-hearted gal with no plan. I was no one’s wife, I was no one’s mother. I had no plan except to prove somehow that I was somebody.
I would be somebody by finding somebody else, I told myself, as women often do. The wonder of the internet caused my world to collide with a poet in Springfield, Missouri. We were prolific pen pals for several months and I asked if we could meet in person. He said no, but he still wanted to write. I set out to win him over with the stories of my life, like I was some sort of modern day Midwestern Scheherazade.
After a while my common sense outweighed my quixotic streak and I gave up on him, beating myself up over all the time I had wasted writing.
Shortly after, I found myself at a storytelling show and I was instantly hooked. I couldn’t get enough of strangers willing to admit that they, too, weren’t made of stone and that they had made messes out of their lives from time to time and that not only should we not hide that, WE SHOULD CELEBRATE THAT SHIT.
After thirteen years of living in the shadow of a writer boyfriend, I decided I could give it a try. I started by reading Anne Lamott and was nearly knocked senseless by her concept that having a broken heart is “like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—it still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
I have made it my mission to consume as many chapters of as many lives of as many people as I possibly can. I’ve been enthralled with tales of you losing your jobs, your spouses, your houses, and your minds. Tales of stealing thousands of dollars to lose gambling, of near fatal car accidents in third world countries, of hitting rock bottom to find out that the ground can open up and go lower. Stories of growing up to be people you never wanted to be, recounts of running at full speed to catch life’s hand grenades with open arms.
I’ve shared my own struggles of being consumed by self-generated darkness, of spackling the cracks of my soul with food and booze and screwing, of a big scar that bisects my body that I was once convinced would mean that no one would ever love me. I’ve embraced the idea that the most compelling protagonists aren’t built of noble suffering or cookie cutter heroics. I doubt anyone reading this would prefer to hear stories of people doing the right thing, of great decision-making, of drinking milk and going to bed early, of meeting your one and only in grade school and living happily ever after. Alright, perhaps you do but you might not want to seek me out in real life. I doubt we have anything to talk about.
And so this is Christmas. In the years that I’ve been on my own, I spent one Christmas talking to a guy I didn’t really know and another hanging out with people I didn’t really like. It’s just another day and life still presses on. But I’m convinced my Grinchy heart has grown three sizes over the years simply because I’ve learned to embrace its fragility.
So if your holiday table is less than Martha Stewart approved, if you have to get your drink on before you even consider dealing with your family, if you just received one of those holiday letters that recounts everyone’s accomplishments in glowing positive detail and heard your inner Nancy Kerrigan screaming, “WWWHHHYYY?”, don’t sweat it. Just know that there are people who cherish and accept you for exactly who you are, lurking around every corner. I know because I am one of them. Although I am no one’s wife, I am no one’s mother, I am, most certainly, somebody. I am somebody who needs to tell and hear stories as they are my lessons on how to dance with a limp.
On Christmas Day of 2002, the day after Karen’s funeral, my boyfriend and I left rural Maine and made the trek back to our home in Seattle. Hundreds of miles in the car, three airplanes, and fourteen hours later, we got to our dark house that had no food as we’d been out of town so long. I hauled out the phone book and desperately flipped through the pages, calling grocery stores, calling restaurants, calling every place I could think of, just to hear endless ringing. I cursed the stupid baby Jesus for being born and screwing up my ability to get something as simple and necessary as dinner, flinging the phone book towards the fireplace. My boyfriend handed me my coat and said, “Get in the car.”
“But there’s no place to go,” I said.
“Get in the car,” he insisted.
When we took the exit off the freeway into Seattle’s International District and I saw the twinkling lights of Chinatown with every restaurant imaginable not only open but bustling with people, I knew that holiday joy was readily available for those who kept their eyes open, for those who chose to believe.
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